


Fine Line

by Shayvaalski



Category: PIERCE Tamora - Works, The Song of the Lioness - Tamora Pierce, Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Developing Relationship, Established Relationship, F/M, Gen, Gender Identity, Implied Relationships, Snippets, Trans Character, Trans Male Character, spectrum slide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-15
Updated: 2015-03-15
Packaged: 2018-03-17 21:58:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3545234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shayvaalski/pseuds/Shayvaalski
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The Trickster tapped me in my mother’s womb," says Okha to Beka in Bloodhound; "Some of us even claim the Trickster is one of us, and makes us so She/He has company."</p><p>Alanna is not the only one touched by the gods, and George's relationship with the Trickster has always been an interesting one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fine Line

**Author's Note:**

> The short italicized quote at the beginning of this fic is taken directly from Terrier, in the entry from Eleni Cooper's journal that begins the book. 
> 
> It's also possible there's a timeline error around the events that take place in the Daine books; I'll check it in the next couple days.

_‘I am too newly come. I cannot tell them, “Keep your children away from my son. Do not let them teach him to steal.” … I cannot afford a better place to live. My family will not have me back, not after our last meeting.’_ _  
_

At least, George thinks when he reads his mother’s journals as an adult—a grown man—she was circumspect enough not to specify why their family wouldn’t have her back. Spindle Lane was a long way from the richer districts, and from the Temples; a mile was a long way in the Lower City, and people kept to their own streets. Eleni hadn’t had to go far, for no one to know her, or her child.

Good thing too, thinks George, and puts the journals back up on the shelf. His mother has always loved Corus: and while she would have left it to keep him safe, it’s a blessing she never had to.

 

When he meets the boy Alan it’s a little like looking at himself six years back; something about the set of the shoulders, or the tilt of the chin, makes George wonder in an idle sort of way. It’s only a minute, maybe two, with that guardsman glaring at them both, but George has met one or two other men walking the same road he is, and the lad has the look, and the right feel; the Sight’s not much good for this but he can get a whiff, like scenting cedarwood at the bottom of a drawer.

But then, he might be wrong. The only reason George has made it so far—he is seventeen—without anyone saying a word is that he lives a Lower City life, questions neither answered nor asked, and since he took the Rogue’s seat no one dares rib him about his lack of beard. And the lad’s heading up to the Palace.

Hard to keep secrets, in the court of the King.

 

He almost tells Jon, the day after he’s officially pardoned. Everything is so blessed strange that one more strange thing can’t make any difference; Jon has seen him shirtless and not asked about the clean scars (two of many, but his mother’s cuts had healed straighter and truer than the others) across his chest, but Jon isn’t always subtle, and George knows he’s noticed.

(George has his own private smiling suspicions about Jon, and what he notices, and why. Not as many suspicions as he has about Goldenlake and Naxen, but enough to be getting on with. They both loved Alanna first as a boy, after all.)

He says nothing. He rarely does.

 

Sometimes in the street George thinks he hears the wind talking to him. Or no; not to him. Past him. Around him. Just voices, scraps and bits of talk, on an empty lane in the Lower City or below the old Kings’ Fountain, talking City cant: voices he knows and doesn’t know. There and gone.

Once he thinks he hears Alan. Once he _knows_ he hears Jon, playing at a rich merchant’s son; but on a day when Johnny hasn’t been down to the City for weeks, or in this part of town for nigh on a month before that—George would know that affected drawl anywhere, and when Orem answers he knows the very night it comes from, a full season back.

He hears himself, too. Just the once, and he stops long enough to listen, thoughtful and appreciative, and then bids himself farewell.

George’s voice has always been—like his mother’s—low.

 

George is never sure which of them knocks the household altar over, but he thinks it might have been Thom the Younger. Certainly the lad is nowhere to be seen when he bends to pick it up, handling Rebakah with gentle hands, and her cat with fond ones (the black paint all but worn off the dark wood beneath; and for no reason it makes him think of Faithful), and setting all the other ancestors whose names he has forgotten back onto their shelves.

When he sets Beka in place there is the tiniest of clicks.

George hasn’t been a thief for almost ten years, but his hearing has never lost the sharpness he learned in young adulthood, and he turns back to the little gods. He looks first at Rebakah in her Guardswoman’s coat, and then at the others in theirs, and then he looks at the solid wood of the altar itself. Or rather, he looks at the drawer suddenly sliding out of it, the seams so fine even George had never felt them.

Inside it, there are journals, handwritten with ink faded enough he needs full sunlight to read it easily, in a cypher he does not know. George doesn’t need to be able to read it to know whose hand it was; the leather Puppy’s badge with two letters burned into the back tells him all he needs to know. He shuts the drawer, but keeps the journals.

It takes him three weeks and his daughter’s help before he is able to call Alanna in and tell her about Pounce.

 

The City of the Gods is not a welcoming place, and Thom does not know he’s there; Alanna does not know he’s there. He’s meant to be in Port Caynn. Instead he is here, establishing a contact. Making sure letters get delivered by someone he can trust.  

If Alan had grown up without the palace lads around her she might be like this, hard even this young—and Thom is hard. Not tough, like Alan is; Alan’s toughness bends, it has places in it other people can live, it is a human sort of strength. Even from only two days watching and hearsay George can feel something in Thom that is less or more than human; and his Sight confirms it.

All the same he leaves the City thoughtful.

 

On the night he takes Alanna to his mother’s house, George’s body gets him dressed without assistance from his mind, moving quickly: why had the lad come to him? Was it just that he was outside the palace and any word he spread would never reach it? He’s taken care both that Alan has seen him bare and that Alan has seen nothing—but mayhap he’s not been careful enough, and Alan knows he’ll keep quiet because of it. Mayhap it’s blackmail at the last.

(It’s not that she’s female that surprised him. It’s that she was a girl.)

In front of him on Moonlight Alan shakes like a leaf. He realizes slowly that the lad—the lass—isn’t thinking about him at all. George recognizes that trembling, the clench of Alan’s hands (he won’t think of her as Alanna for years still, not really) over her belly, and feels a sympathetic twinge in his own guts. She might be a girl but they’re more alike than not—he thinks of Old Solom deep in his cups, George just starting to gather his court around him, the old Rogue still before the fire, saying with those gray eyes that will someday remind him of Myles, “Men and women are only the littlest step apart, Cooper, and it’s a line y’can walk if you’re careful,” and George too young to hear him. Already knowing where he stood.

His mother’s house is not far away. George has brought other men to her, and women too, for the thoughtful silence that seems to run in their blood, that Alan will need even if he is a girl.

A girl knight, thinks George, and smiles to himself. And won’t his ma be pleased.

 

When he gets to the part in Beka’s journals about Okha and the God they share, he laughs for days, because the alternative to laughing is not being able to breathe. George has never thought he was alone, but there are connections he has failed to make.

 

Myles guesses and his mother confirms. Rispah knew once but has forgotten, and Solom is dead.

They decide there is no reason for their children to know.

 

George never grows a beard, which Alanna tells him on the parapet at Pirate’s Swoop she prefers. They are both watching Numair with his three-days-growth trying to stay upright and failing, and they both think that maybe they will die in the next candlemark. George laughs.

“Sure,” he says, “and aren’t I glad you kept your boyish figure?”

She slips her arm through his. In some way she is still the lad Alan, stocky and short-haired, and in others she is very much his lady wife.

A thin line, Cooper.

The rocks hit the curtain wall, and Daine screams, wonder and fear all mixed together. Above them is a dragon, inhuman, impossible.

 

For Alan’s sake, and nothing else, George is half in love with Thom. He’s a pompous ass, his power levels are unsettling, and the company he keeps appalling; but George misses Alanna with an ache like a wound and Thom is red-headed and stubborn and arrogant. He’s nothing like Alan, but he’s who she might have been.

When some months later he rides hell bent for leather to Si-cham and the City of the Gods, it’s both of them he does it for.

 

When George is still young enough to sit at Eleni’s feet in a nightdress she tells him stories of lady knights, softly, so that her sister and mother will not hear, and of the Guardswomen, and mercenaries with skin like silk and hair like the waves on the sea, and the Shang Toro, of whom was said she took an army with her when she died.

George will never be a knight, but Eleni still has hopes.

 

“Buri,” says Alanna, naked in their bed. George has a sheet pulled over legs and hip, arms crossed behind his head.

“Unsurprised and empathetic.”

This is an old game, but they both enjoy it, especially early in the morning with the door locked. Privacy, with the twins up and running now, is in short supply, and George himself taught their eldest to pick locks.

After a contemplative moment Alanna says, “Raoul.”

“A fine joke—remember him before your Ordeal?—if gone on a wee bit too long.” George shifts, rests his palms on his belly.

The silence before her third question goes on so long that George fears they’ll have the maid rattling at the door, or the lads piling through it, afore she has a chance to ask.

“Thom,” Alanna says at last, as he knew she’d have to sometime. George props himself up on one elbow.

“Darlin’ girl,” he drawls, and she look up at him. “Didn’t I tell you?”

Alanna narrows purple eyes at him, a familiar scowl growing between them and on her mouth. Her twin was never half so handsome, but George has a soft spot for him nonetheless, for the sake of his blessing. “Tell me what, laddy-buck?”

George leans to kiss her.

“He already knew.”

 

His mother never asks how it comes to be that his children have his eyes.


End file.
